Category: Media

When even the proggie editors at the LA Times print this……..

As violent crimes surge, Californians’ faith in gun control slips in new poll

SACRAMENTO —  Amid a surge in shootings this year, a majority of California voters say that they believe gun control laws are effective in reducing violent crime, but confidence in them has slipped, according to a new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times.The poll released Thursday found that 56% of the state’s voters surveyed believe stronger laws restricting the sale and possession of guns help make their communities safer, but the number is down from 60% who felt that way three years ago.

The poll also found that 57% of California voters say it is more important to place greater controls on gun ownership than it is to protect Americans’ rights to own guns under the 2nd Amendment, but that number is down from 64% who felt that way in 2018.

The decline in confidence in gun laws is a response to what people are seeing in their communities, said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll.

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When the ‘Fact-Checker’ gets it right back at them

PolitiFact Claims Joe Biden ‘Doesn’t Want to Ban Handguns,’ But Here Are His Actual Words.

Joe Biden has been pretty clear about his desire to ban handguns.

During his CNN town hall last week, Biden was asked, “So, how will you address gun violence, from a federal point of view, to actually bring about change and make our local cities safer?”

In his response, Biden told the woman who asked the question: “The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon — whether it’s a — whether it’s a 9-millimeter pistol or whether it’s a rifle — is ridiculous. I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things…”

In response to the tweet from House Republicans declaring that Biden “says he wants to ban handguns,” PolitiFact claims “the clip doesn’t back up the GOP tweet, and the full transcript goes further to sink this claim.”

PolitiFact claims that the numbers cited by Biden “apply to assault-style firearms and high-capacity magazines. As recently as June, when Biden rolled out his strategy to bring down murders, he said he wants to ban both.”

“Experts disagree over what is or isn’t an assault weapon. States set different thresholds for what qualifies as a high-capacity magazine,” PolitiFact continued, before adding, “But regardless of the definition, neither term includes all handguns.”

Did anyone say Biden wants to ban all handguns? Nope. Yet, PolitiFact unwittingly admitted in its analysis that some handguns would be affected by Biden’s gun control proposal. So, does Biden want to ban handguns? He’s publicly indicated that he wants to ban some. There’s no doubt about that.

Yet, PolitiFact rated the claim that Biden wants to ban handguns as “False.” In fairness, they could have gotten away with rating the claim “Half True” because one could argue that the House GOP’s wording wasn’t clear, but they didn’t take Biden’s words out of context. They even showed the video of Biden’s response to the question. Biden may not have said he wanted to ban all handguns, but he clearly said he wants to ban some. Yet, PolitiFact disingenuously rated the claim false, which seems to imply that Biden never said he wanted to ban any handguns at all.

Gun Owners of America (GOA):

Here is why the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s new “militia” database likely includes you–a gun owner who believes gun control is unconstitutional:

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BLUF:
For those intending to watch ABC News’ “One Nation Under Fire,” they would do well to remember that what is being presented is propaganda, not reality. It will be another part of the effort to separate gun owners from their firearms, turn local police departments into mere appendages of a national police force, and prepare the nation for the imposition of the left-wing Marxist agenda.

ABC News’ “One Nation Under Fire” Will Promote the Lie About Gun Violence in the U.S.

ABC News is launching another attack on gun rights, starting Sunday. Its project, called “One Nation Under Fire”, will join with ABC affiliates across the country as well as with Good Morning America and GMA3. Variety, which made the announcement, breathlessly rejoiced that “various ABC-owned stations may also contribute their own reports on findings in their area of coverage.”

So, what will ABC News be using as its source to back up the attack? False data from the Gun Violence Archive, long considered to be biased in favor of more gun regulations and controls.

Said Pierre Thomas, ABC News’ chief justice correspondent, “We hope this is going to give us a better sense of who, what, where and why and that people will walk away from this with a much better sense of what’s happening.” That would include, of course, according to Variety, “solutions that might help reduce gun violence.”

Those watching to the end will no doubt have their opinions formed in the cauldron of canards, misinformation, and distortions served up by Gun Violence Archive.

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Facebook Flags the Name of a Gardening Tool When Used in a Gardening Group

The Biden White House leans on Facebook to censor your speech online if what you say goes against what the Biden White House wants you to say.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fact. Let’s see how well Facebook handles the very sensitive topic of policing even non-political speech in a nation that’s built on the principle that speech must be free, and where people have wide varieties of interests that may fall outside Silicon Valley’s collective experiences.

Facebook flagged the word hoe in a gardening group.

Oh. No. They censored “hoe.”

Wait ’til they figure out what people do with certain emojis…

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

This is funny and would be a lot funnier if the Biden White House hadn’t deputized Facebook to chase you and me around on its platform if we post something the regime doesn’t like. But it has.

Dumb White House plus dumb censors = a major problem.

Yesterday I tried to share a graphic on Facebook that said factually true things that are not in dispute. Facebook gave me a little warning as I was posting, as if to flash a yellow light, warning me to slow down and think about whether I really want to speak against the regime.

I posted it anyway and headlined it noting that Facebook tried to slow it down. I am both an American and a Texan.

Back to the hoe scandal. Facebook said it would put more humans on the task, supposedly to avoid censoring hoes and the like. That’s not a comfort to any thinking individual.

The extra set of eyes did not prevent a subsequent post in the group from being automatically disabled because of “possible violence, incitement, or hate in multiple comments,” Licata said.

“Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” were some comments Facebook deemed offensive, according to the moderator.

(Eyeroll.)

Japanese beetles are jerks.

Japanese beetles are a serious pest of flowers, trees and shrubs, fruits and vegetables, field crops and turf.

That’s not me talking. That’s the University of Minnesota. Whoever wrote that will be hauled in for sensitivity training any minute now.

We live in a time in which some dopey scientist out there wants us all to mind the feelings of sharks, and the stupid mainstream media doesn’t laugh him straight off the nearest pier.

The LA Times Gets It Wrong on Gun Rights

The Los Angeles Times had an editorial yesterday whose title pretty much says it all: “18-Year-Olds Shouldn’t Have the Right to Buy Guns.”

So, let me see if I correctly understand the Times’s position. An 18-year-old woman is walking down a dark street at night. She is accosted by a much bigger, stronger man who violently grabs her. He is armed with a gun and threatens to kill her if she resists. She isn’t armed because of the Times‘s gun-control law that prohibits 18-year-olds, including women, from buying guns. He proceeds to tear her clothes off and rape her. Hoping that she won’t be killed, she submits to the rape. 

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, in its editorial the Times failed to answer an important question: How is that 18-year-old woman supposed to defend herself against that rapist?  

What the Times is essentially advocating is a law that prevents people from defending themselves against rapists and murderers. That 18-year-old woman might not be physically strong enough to resist that rapist, but with one Glock 19 that she pulls out of her purse, things are now equalized. Now it doesn’t matter how much bigger and stronger her rapist is. She can stop him from raping her with just one bullet fired into his abdomen.

Why shouldn’t that 18-year-old woman have the right to defend herself against that rapist? Why should she be required to submit to the rape or else be murdered?

The Times writes:

True, the right to puff on cigarettes or drink alcohol is not written into the U.S. Constitution. But neither is a guarantee that the right to bear arms goes with being a particular age.

Lamentably, those two sentences reflect a woeful lack of understanding of people’s rights and the Constitution. Rights don’t come from the Constitution. They preexist both the Constitution and the federal government that the Constitution called into existence. 

Remember: We just celebrated the Fourth of July, the day on which the Declaration of Independence was published in 1776. That document expressed the revolutionary truth that people’s rights come from nature and God, not from government and not from some document that calls government into existence.

The Constitution never purported to establish people’s rights. It simply called into existence a government whose powers were limited to those few powers that were enumerated in the Constitution itself. If a power wasn’t enumerated, it could not be exercised.

Extremely leery about this new government, the American people demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights, which expressly protects the citizenry from the federal government. Contrary to popular belief, however, especially in the mainstream press, people’s rights also don’t come from the Bill of Rights. The First and Second Amendments, for example, do not give people the rights of free speech, religious liberty, freedom of assembly, and the right to keep and bear arms. Instead, they prohibit the federal government from infringing on these fundamental rights. 

In fact, what many in the mainstream press fail to recognize is that if the Bill of Rights had never been enacted, people would still have the rights of free speech, religious liberty, freedom of assembly, and the right to keep and bear arms. That’s because people’s natural, God-given rights preexist government.

Oddly, in its editorial the Times didn’t advocate a minimum age of 21 for military service. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the military permit 18-year-old men to handle guns and even orders them to use automatic weapons to kill people in faraway lands who have never committed any act of violence against the United States? Why does the Times trust those 18-year-olds with guns and not private 18-year-olds?

Finally, in its editorial the Times unfortunately failed to call for an end to the root cause of much of the violence in American society — the much-vaunted war on drugs that unfortunately much of the mainstream press continues to support, notwithstanding the massive violence it has been producing for some 50 years. Rather than prohibit 18-year-olds from defending themselves, why not end this horrific government program and then see if gun violence is still a major problem in America?

 

 

Warning; Some strong language within

Liberal Reporter Rips Biden White House’s Endorsement for Social Media Purges

The purge is coming. Actually, a soft version of it already happened after the 2020 election, but the real purge is coming. The previous one was merely a test run. Last Friday, White House Spokesperson Jen Psaki was quite clear that if you’re banned on one platform, you should be banned on all of them. Who the hell are these people? We were worried about authoritarianism under Trump which was always an overreaction by the liberal media because they’re babies, but this was an actual shot across the bow. Big government and the communists in Silicon Valley uniting to censor political speech they don’t like. I know I don’t need to say more on the subject, but even liberal reporters, like Glenn Greenwald, are appalled by this move, calling it some “pernicious s***.”

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It’s not just the 2nd amendment that the demoncraps don’t like.
This is the US goobermint working with tech companies to censor unapproved opinions about the bug.
But since it’s just stopping the spread of “disinformation”, it’s perfectly acceptable and nothing to be worried about.

Because USA Today is nothing more than another political hack publication?

Why Are Michael Bloomberg’s Anti-Gun ‘Journalists’ Writing for USA TODAY?

Earlier this month, I wrote a story that showed how USA Today had partnered with Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory, The Trace, for an investigative series – a collaboration which violated more than a few of the Gannett-owned newspaper’s ethical principles.

Now, it appears that the relationship between Bloomberg’s anti-gun activists and USA TODAY has grown even more cuddly. The Trace activists – I cannot call them reporters – are writing “news” stories directly for the paper, as if they’re on the staff.

To be clear, anti-gun advocates whose stated goal is further restricting your constitutional rights are writing biased stories for one of the country’s largest newspapers, and no one at the paper seems to care.

The Trace, as you’ll recall, describes itself as the “only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence.” It has slick digital packages that are chockfull of stories, photos and videos, so it’s easy to confuse the Trace with an actual news website. But a news website it is not.

The Trace was founded in 2015 by former New York City mayor and staunch gun-control advocate, Michael Bloomberg. It operates as the propaganda arm for Bloomberg’s other anti-gun groups, which include Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, which Bloomberg also bankrolls.

The Trace advocates for more restrictive gun laws, but their message is a lot slicker than the handmade signs carried by Demanding Moms and Everytown employees. Reporters at the Trace are activists, not news reporters. They advocate for more gun control. That’s their job.

Last week, USA TODAY published a story titled: “The ATF’s failure to produce public records keeps the gun industry in the shadows.”

It was written by Daniel Nass, the Trace’s associate editor for data and graphics, and Alain Stephens, the Trace’s West Coast Correspondent. Stephens, you should know, describes himself as a veteran and a gun owner. There is no editor’s note explaining why the newspaper allowed a couple of professional anti-gun activists to write the story, rather than its own staff reporters.

This should tell you all you need to know about the newspaper, its leadership and their complete disdain for the truth, transparency, and of course the Second Amendment.

I spent 20 years as a newspaperman – both as an investigative reporter and an editor. It used to be difficult for an activist group just to get a letter to the editor or a guest column published on the opinion page. Now, USA TODAY allows activists to write their own stories, which it then publishes as if they’re legitimate news. For any activist group, this is like winning the trifecta.

This is unprecedented, even for Gannett.

The newspaper’s ethical principle concerning maintaining independence states: “We will maintain an impartial, arm’s length relationship with anyone seeking to influence the news,” and “We will be free of improper obligations to news sources, newsmakers and advertisers.”

How can the paper maintain an impartial and arm’s length relationship with anyone seeking to influence the news – as activists tend to do – if they allow the activists to write their own stories? How can USA TODAY be free of improper obligations if it allows advocates to write whatever they want?

Gannett’s editing skeptically principle requires editors to “protect against being manipulated by advocates and special interests.” The Trace staffers are definitely advocates, and it’s a special interest group, after all. How is this skeptical editing? How are the editors not being manipulated by advocates?

As I have said before on numerous occasions, when it comes to guns, the media could care less about ethics, accuracy or fairness.

Once again, I sent an email to Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president and publisher of USA TODAY, seeking comment for this story. I have yet to receive a reply.

That, too, is not a surprise.

Credit where credit is due. Politifact bears continual watching due to its leftist bent, but this time they got it right.

Joe Biden stated on June 23, 2021 in a White House announcement:

“The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own.”

Joe Biden gets history wrong on the Second Amendment limiting gun ownership

IF YOUR TIME IS SHORT

  • The Second Amendment limited governmental power, not the right of individuals to own a weapon.
  • Laws at the time that limited firearm ownership were primarily racist, aimed at controlling Black people and Native Americans.
  • The first national gun regulation law in 1934 did not rely on the Second Amendment.
See the sources for this fact-check

President Joe Biden’s plan to curb rising violence relies on several steps: more aid to local police departments, expanding job programs for young adults, more violence intervention programs, and tougher measures to shut down gun sellers who break federal laws.

“Rogue gun dealers feel like they can get away with selling guns to people who aren’t legally allowed to own them,” Biden said June 23. “There has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.”

And, Biden said, that power was rooted in history.

“The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own,” Biden said. “You couldn’t buy a cannon.”

We reached out to the White House and received no comment, but Biden’s statement is not accurate history.

During the campaign, Biden made a similar claim about cannons in the Revolutionary War and who could own them. We rated that False.

This time, on top of that, Biden misrepresents what the Second Amendment says.

Second Amendment places no limits, experts say
The text of the Second Amendment is short: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds said the amendment’s few words speak for themselves.

“The Second Amendment places no limits on individual ownership of cannon, or any other arms,” Reynolds said.

There have been many court cases to resolve whether the amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it does.

Setting aside ongoing disagreements over that ruling, Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson said, “The amendment limited government action, not people.”

“The first federal gun control law does not appear until the 20th century,” Johnson said.

That law, the National Firearms Act, came in 1934 when machine guns were the weapon of choice of Prohibition Era gangsters. (The law was drafted before Prohibition ended in 1933.) When U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings made the case for the law before the House Ways and Means Committee, he based it on the government’s power to tax and regulate interstate commerce, not the Second Amendment.

“If we made a statute absolutely forbidding any human being to have a machine gun, you might say there is some constitutional question involved,” Cummings said April 16, 1934. “But when you say ‘We will tax the machine gun’ and when you say that ‘the absence of a license showing payment of the tax has been made indicates that a crime has been perpetrated,’ you are easily within the law.”

The debate that framed the Second Amendment

From the way Biden put it, the Second Amendment regulated weapons. The more immediate driver in 1787 was the desire to keep the federal government in check.

The framers of the Constitution agreed that a federal government might need a standing army. But coming out from under one despot, they wanted to avoid creating another. This was something that Federalists and Anti-Federalists could agree on, wrote Valparaiso law professor David Vandercoy.

“Both believed the greatest danger to the new republic was tyrannical government and that the ultimate check on tyranny was an armed population,” Vandercoy wrote in 1994.

Restricting weapons to control perceived threats

There were some state and local laws after the Second Amendment was adopted in 1792 that limited firearms.

The most sweeping ones barred Black people, free or enslaved, from owning them.

A 1792 Virginia law, for example, said, “No Negro or mulatto whatsoever shall keep or carry any gun, powder, shot, club or other weapon whatsoever.”

Historian Saul Cornell at Fordham found other laws aimed at controlling certain groups. Some banned gun ownership by people who backed the British. Others targeted Native Americans.

Cornell also pointed to a 1795 Massachusetts law that mainly targeted rioters but gave local authorities broad latitude to arrest people who carried firearms.

“The (National Rifle Association) will call out Biden, correctly, that there were no modern style gun control laws in the Founding era because there was little interpersonal gun violence among persons of European origin,” Cornell said. “Gun control groups will correctly say that a variety of robust regulations existed at the time of the Second Amendment and that the Founders feared anarchy as much as tyranny.”

Cornell argues that for about the first 50 years after passage of the Second Amendment, gun technology was limited. The issues of crime and safety that drive the modern debate, he said, didn’t begin to emerge until manufacturers began producing reliable, affordable guns in greater volume.

Our ruling

Biden said that from the start, the Second Amendment “limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own.”

The Second Amendment limited government power, not the rights of individuals. Laws at the time that limited firearm ownership were primarily racist, aimed at controlling Black people and Native Americans.

Broadly, gun regulation came decades after passage of the Second Amendment when gun technology changed. The first national gun regulation law did not rely on the Second Amendment.

We rate Biden’s claim False.

BLUF:

In my humble opinion, the Biden/Harris administration, the legacy media and the folks at The Trace and other anti-rights groups are scared witless by the Second Amendment Sanctuary movement…..
As the movement grows — and it is growing by leaps and bounds — we will see more attacks from politicians, which will then be parroted by their staunch supporters in the legacy media, assuming, that is, they can break a reporter loose from their hard-hitting, investigative coverage of Joe Biden’s ice cream cone du jour.

No, NPR, there aren’t 400 Second Amendment Sanctuary counties in the US — there are 1,930

Taxpayer funded National Public Radio tries to downplay and trivialize the Second Amendment Sanctuary movement, without letting the facts get in their way.

To be clear, there are 1,930 counties that have now become Second Amendment Sanctuaries, which is more than 61% of all the counties in the United States.

Of these counties, 1,137 made the decision to protect the Second Amendment on their own. The rest are located in the 15  states — the most recent being Texas — that declared themselves Second Amendment Sanctuaries, according to Noah Davis of sanctuarycounties.com and its companion site constitutionalsanctuaries.com.

Davis has the most up-to-date maps and data available on the topic. He has tracked the Second Amendment Sanctuary movement since its inception in his home state of Virginia.

The fact more than 61% of the country has chosen to protect the Second Amendment rights of their citizens has largely been ignored by the legacy media. If they have bothered to do a story on sanctuaries at all, their goal has been to downplay if not belittle the movement. Of course, that, friends, is what we call spin.

Taxpayer subsidized National Public Radio is the latest to try to torpedo the movement, which is growing every single day.

On NPR’s June 21 edition of “Here & Now,” the host falsely states there are only 400 counties that have become Second Amendment Sanctuaries, not 1,930. This is a common error among the legacy media. Davis has said it stems from a story originally published more than a year ago by Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory — The Trace. The story keeps rebounding around the internet, even though the numbers have increased significantly, because of lazy reporting and shoddy research.

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The LA Times is Still Denying the Second Amendment

The Los Angeles Times editorial page is less a journalistic enterprise than it is a partisan grievance noticeboard. The editorial board’s descent into trivial activist messaging was on full display in a pair of recent pieces lamenting the federal judiciary’s recognition of the Second Amendment. In both, the editorial board denied the core rulings in the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago that recognized the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. In neither piece did the would-be jurists at the L.A. Times offer evidence or argument as to their incorrect position or why the legal analysis of self-important regime press agents should carry any weight whatsoever.

The first editorial was published on April 26 and titled, “The Supreme Court agrees to hear a case that could mean more guns in public.” The item took issue with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to grant cert to NRA-backed case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett. The case challenges New York’s concealed carry licensing scheme and could prompt the Court to recognize that the right to keep and bear arms extends outside the home.

Lamenting the Court’s cert decision, the editorial board wrote,

The case the court accepted Monday (New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. Inc. vs. Corlett) follows the court’s controversial 2008 Heller decision, which for the first time enunciated a right to own a firearm in the home for self-protection, breaking with historic perceptions that the right was conferred only to members of state militias. From our perspective, it was an errant reading of the Constitution, but unfortunately the nation is stuck with it.

The second editorial was published June 7 and titled, “The judge is wrong: California’s assault-weapons ban must stand.” This piece complained about the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in Miller v. Bonta. The decision, by Judge Roger Benitez, found that California’s ban on commonly-owned semiautomatic firearms violated the Second Amendment.

Benitez’s ruling on the California ban was the result of a faithful interpretation of the Heller and McDonald decisions. We can be certain of this because Heller author Justice Antonin Scalia signed onto a dissent from the denial of certiorari in Friedman v. Highland Park, a case concerning a local ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms, that stated as much. The dissent noted,

Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.

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Why Is Austin Media Refusing to Release Description of At-Large Austin Shooter? Just Kidding. You Know Why.

Early Saturday morning, a gunman shot and injured at least 19 people outside an Austin, Texas, bar. Rick Moran reported:

Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, was crowded with post-Covid revelers on Friday night when a man described as “black” with a thin build and “dreadlocks” opened fire outside a bar. At least 13 people were taken to the hospital. Of the 13 wounded, 11 were in stable condition with two critical.

On Saturday afternoon, the Austin Police Department updated its website to say that one suspect is in custody, while another is still at large. Earlier in the day, police released this description of the suspect:

The suspect(s) remains at-large. It is unknown if there is one, or multiple suspects involved. There is one suspect described as a black male, with dread locks, wearing a black shirt and a skinny build. The area will be closed for an extended amount of time to process the crime scene. Investigators are collecting and reviewing camera footage and surveillance video.

That description—black, male, dreadlocks—was not only in an official announcement by the APD, but it was all over social media as well on Saturday. But the city’s flagship newspaper, the Austin-American Statesman, is refusing to release the description of the suspect, a dangerous mass shooter who is still on the run, because—you guessed it—it would be racist to do so. The newspaper explained in an Editor’s Note appended to its main story on the shooting:

Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The Austin American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes. If more detailed information is released, we will update our reporting.

The description by police was not, by any stretch of the imagination, “vague.” The description, in fact, dramatically reduced the suspect pool in the Austin area, narrowing it down to black males wearing dreadlocks—or 50% of the 15% black population in the city, if you’re doing the math. If you’re a police officer (or a citizen who is on the lookout for an at-large criminal) wouldn’t you want to know that information? Wouldn’t you need that information to make an arrest?

Related:Black Murder Rate Soars Thanks to BLM And Lefty Politicians

And then there’s this bit from the newspaper’s report: “Police said they had zeroed in on two suspects involved in [a] previous dispute and were rapidly working to arrest them.”

In other words, the Statesman knew that the police knew who the suspects were. If police said the suspects were black, why didn’t the newspaper take the APD at its word? I’ll tell you why: the Statesman wants to perpetuate the fictional narrative that dangerous, gun-toting white supremacist rednecks are roaming the city of Austin, hunting black people.

The Statesman would have us believe that everyone in the Austin area was a potential suspect, when, in fact, the newspaper knew that not to be true. (On a related note, the same public safety issues arise when no one knows whether a suspect is a male or a female because assuming someone’s gender might result in hurt feelings.)

Austin is not alone in prioritizing the woke agenda over safety. As PJM’s Kevin Downey Jr. reported last week, San Francisco police released the picture of a suspect who lit a woman on fire on a BART train, but blurred out her face, purportedly to avoid perpetuating racial stereotypes.

Austin and other U.S. cities continue to demonstrate that they care more about being woke than protecting the public from dangerous criminals. That’s why, as PJM’s Bryan Preston has documented, police are retiring or fleeing these cities in droves and murder rates are skyrocketed all over the country.

If I were an Austonian right now I’d be putting my house on the market and getting out before it turns into another Chicago gangland.

Likely voters back right to carry concealed guns, 2-1

In a slap at President Joe Biden’s new effort to impose gun control and tax and regulate one of the nation’s most popular (and concealable) firearms, people overwhelmingly have endorsed expanding the Second Amendment to include carrying concealed weapons.

In a new Zogby Poll provided to Secrets Thursday just minutes before the administration released its rule to target AR-rifle-style pistols, likely voters by a 63%-29% margin endorsed the idea.

consealedcarry060721.png

In his analysis, pollster Jonathan Zogby said that most voters “agreed that the Second Amendment to the Constitution should also encompass the right to carry a concealed gun. A majority of voters supported concealed carry as a part of the Second Amendment in all regions.”

The poll, one of a series he released through Secrets this week, is the first to find support for concealed carry laws to be added to the Second Amendment.

And it comes as the Supreme Court is considering a New York ban on concealed carry and Biden is eyeing new gun control laws, including taxing and registering millions of legally purchased AR-rifle-style pistols.

Concealed carry has become a hot-button issue as some liberal states move to limit the issuance of permits, though a majority do. And in Washington, there are several efforts in the House and the Senate to approve national “reciprocity” for permit-holders to travel between states with their concealed weapons.

The survey is likely to be seized upon by the authors of the legislation.

It also confirmed a trend seen in gun stores of many more buyers, including women, black people, and minorities, getting handguns to protect themselves as crime increases.

Comment O’ The Day:
“I could be down for this. Maybe it would keep those afraid of any firearm from moving away from the coasts.”

BLUF:
Virginia is concerned about a “bad” America.
The one to which she refers — one in which houses host guns — was previously known to both Republicans and Democrats as just “America.”

LA Times Writer Wants Gun Ownership Reported on Real Estate Listings, but for the Opposite Reason as You

When you’re considering moving to a new area, what are the pluses that matter most? Low crime? Good schools? Trash pickup?

A writer for The Los Angeles Times has another metric that may be worth consideration.

On Tuesday, opinion columnist Virginia Heffernan took to Twitter with an idea:

“Real-estate listings should include prevalence of gun-ownership in a 50-mile radius…”

She’d also like info on the “number of annual mass shootings in the region.”

“Time to change what a ‘bad neighborhood’ is,” she announced.

What if someone owns a modern sporting rifle, also known as the best-selling hunting rifle in America?

She believes that’d constitute a bad place for children:

“[A]nd introduce a meaningful tax on guns and gun violence. No one should say, ‘This is a great place to raise kids’ about neighborhoods where even one person has an assault rifle.”

Stop all the racializing:

“The metric would be simple. Example: Staten Island (pop 474k) has 4x the gun ownership per capita of the Bronx (pop 1.4m). If that reads as safer or more [free] to some people, Staten Island is for them. If not, maybe time for the Bronx. Take race, class, politics out of the real-estate equation.”

 

There’d definitely be a lot of items to track.

In 2018, Switzerland’s Small Arms Survey reported there were nearly 400,000,000 guns in the United States.

That was, obviously, two years before 2020’s gun-buying surge.

As for “assault rifles,” the AR-15’s certainly been vilified courtesy of impressive, dedicated effort by some on the Left side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, of course, ownership of any firearm doesn’t equal impending murder, and the lightweight modern rifle isn’t employed in most gun crimes.

The vast majority of such are, as you know, committed with handguns.

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When even NPR (National People’s Radio /sarc) openly posts an article about a pro gun court ruling……………

California Assault Weapons Ban ‘Disrespects’ Freedom, Federal Judge Writes

For more than three decades, California has banned certain types of semiautomatic rifles including the AR-15 under an “assault weapons” ban. On Friday, a federal judge threw out the ban, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“The Second Amendment is about America’s freedom: the freedom to protect oneself, family, home, and homeland,” Judge Roger Benitez wrote for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. “California’s assault weapon ban disrespects that freedom.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the decision “a direct threat to public safety,” and state Attorney General Rob Bonta has said the state would appeal.

Courts differ on whether assault weapons bans are constitutional. That’s because the Supreme Court has never actually heard a case testing their constitutionality.

The main guidance for lower courts comes from District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark 2008 decision permitting private citizens to keep handguns in the home. The Heller test is straightforward: Is the firearm commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes?

“If the lower courts were following Heller directly … that would be the end of the case,” said David Kopel, a constitutional law professor at Denver University Sturm College of Law, and adjunct scholar at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

But some courts, including federal courts in California, use a multi-step test that requires “policy-balancing,” Kopel told NPR. That’s why Benitez’s 94-page opinion so exhaustively examines the pros and cons of an assault weapons ban.

Among similar cases that have been heard across the country, Benitez’s opinion is “by far the most thorough in its careful examination of the evidence,” Kopel said.

“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of Second Amendment protection,” Judge Benitez wrote. The firearms that the California legislature had deemed “assault weapons” are actually “ordinary, popular, modern rifles,” he said.

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Domino’s driver shoots at brazen teen robber in Pine Manor

Lee County deputies say 16-year old Hayden Celin tried robbing the Domino’s driver in a failed setup.

The driver tried delivering a pizza to a home in Pine Manor, but the family inside said they never placed an order.

When the driver returned to his car, he noticed his cell phone was missing.

As the driver went to leave, Celin allegedly punched him in the face, and shot a water gun loaded with pepper spray into the man’s face.

That’s when the driver pulled out a gun he carries for self-defense, and shot several rounds at the suspect as he drove off.

Deputies eventually caught up with Celin at the nearby Red Cedar apartment complex.

Celin faces charges for robbery with a weapon and burglary.

The victim was treated for his injuries.